


Bigger Than You Think

by belford



Category: Le città invisibili | Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino, xkcd 1110 (Click and Drag)
Genre: Gen, Interactive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 12:57:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/598023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belford/pseuds/belford
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An interactive story of exploration.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bigger Than You Think

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pax/gifts).



This Yuletide offering is an interactive narrative! It is not hosted on the AO3 server. Instead, please visit:

<http://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/btyt/>

You will play the story directly in your web browser. (Javascript is required.) It is a choice-based game. Every few paragraphs, you will have the opportunity to decide what happens next in the story. Type one of the boldface words (or click on it) to select an option. You may always type (or click) "START" to return to the beginning.

The story contains roughly 5000 words of content, although of course any given run-through will be shorter.

 _Bigger Than You Think_ is a game, or game-like experience. It contains secrets and things to uncover. The story can end several ways; one ending is "the best" ending, if I may say so, but it is not easy to reach.

Because of this, I am pre-declaring that the comments below are a spoiler zone! Feel free to discuss what you have discovered in the comments. If you want to play entirely on your own, don't read the comments.

If you are interested in the source code, look at <http://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/btyt/btyt-src.html>. Needless to say, the source code is also made of spoilers.

Enjoy.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy reveal day! It is I, your author.
> 
> I am Andrew Plotkin, fairly-well-known interactive fiction person. (I saw at least one reader guess that.) I am delighted and humbled by the outpouring of comments here. I had fun writing this thing, but I had no idea it would be so popular! I cannot hope to answer every comment. Thank you all for enjoying the story!
> 
> I wrote BTYT in Inform 7 (inform7.com), a popular IF design system. However, I customized the library quite a bit. A lot, in fact. As several people noted, BTYT is a hybrid -- mostly a CYOA-style game, but with an IF-like inventory. This allows me to break away from the standard CYOA "select from these three choices" model.
> 
> (I could get into a whole tangent about whether this is really "interactive fiction" and what that means and whether old-style (parser) IF is insufficiently approachable and whether a different kind of game would have worked better in Yuletide, or not as well... As you might guess, this is a hot-button issue for me. So I will skip that for now.)
> 
> I have moved the game from its original anonymous Dropbox URL to my home web site. I have also updated the game slightly (put in my name, put in credits, fixed the no-cookies bug). The source code is also now available, if anybody wants a look. It is *not* so tidily organized that anybody can start writing a game "like this" -- I apologize for that. But if you want to tackle such a project, let me know and I can try to clean it up.
> 
> I hope this game has served not just as a Yuletide treat, but as an invitation! It would be awesome to see more interactive fanfic next year. I know there were at least two other interactive works *this* year -- Flourish did a Twin Peaks visual-novel piece, and genericgeekgirl wrote a small House Hippo game in Inform 7. (Blame Flourish for getting us all into Yuletide in the first place.) More of these! I promise it is less work than writing some of the (fantastic) long-form Yuletide stories I've read this past week.
> 
> Assorted other trivia:
> 
> Back at signup time, I wrote down a list of fandoms I could imagine writing IF for. (Invisible Cities, Snarkout Boys, Codex Seraphinianus...) I particularly liked the idea of Marco Polo visiting Seraphinianus! Crossover made in... somewhere, right? But the assignment came in for xkcd, and then Marco Polo just -- stuck around. I think I literally forgot which crossover I wanted to do, and made this one work.
> 
> Much later, *after* I'd designed the whole thing, I remembered that someone in the xkcd strip *is playing Marco Polo*. The game, I mean. (http://imgs.xkcd.com/clickdrag/1n11w.png) I would feel dead clever if I'd *remembered* that when I stuck in the reference, but no, total coincidence...
> 
> I have met Randall Munroe, as it happens. We were on an ad-hoc panel discussion together last summer. So I sat next to him and we shook hands and tried to talk semi-coherently about Kickstarter and being an indie artist, but we didn't have a conversation as such. I did not contact him about BTYT, and I haven't gone looking to see if he's mentioned it.
> 
> (Hm. It would make a good interactive illustrated iPad comic, wouldn't it? Have to think about that.)


End file.
